Chapter One: Percy's Hypothesis
Part 1.2 - A Sequestered School-life
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“Wake up, wake up, and be a productive member of a free society!” shouted Mom as she did every morning since his youth, verbatim, in the exact same tone and the same exact cadence. She shut off Percy's rusted blue box-fan and swiftly exited his bedroom, leaving the sweltering heat to soon collect and force him from his ever embracing quilted cocoon.
Through a tendon tightening yawn he wiped the sleep from his overly crusted eyes and tore himself from bed. He set flesh foot to wooden floor and lumbered down creaky old Victorian stairs patiently muttering, “I really wish you wouldn't do that.”
As a flapjack hit the griddle Mom shouted without recognition of volume, “Well, just how long do you think I should let you sleep in, lazy-bones? You've been down since midday yesterday and your brother's been at it since before dawn.” She lifted her buttered spatula in the air, stabbing it toward the tattered walls proclaiming, “He's already changed the wallpaper in the entire kitchen!”
To his knowledge Percy had no brother and the wallpaper had been the same awful mint floral filigree since before he could remember, but this kind of incongruous speech had been growing more and more frequent with Mom these days and Percy was growing more and more accustomed to it. It had recently become apparent that Mom was officially, irreparably, losing her mind and Percy was to bare the brunt of responsibility alone. There was no one else to speak of. There were no monetary nets set to catch her as she fell. And, the guilt did accrue as the bills, fees, tuition, and self-imposed penances heaped upon his competent shoulders.
This was the fuel that drove Percy's work in dreams, for it was his belief that reality can be terraformed. If studied deep enough, postulated upon and tried, he just knew he would be able to save her through thought alone.
If only he could just choose her to be well! Since standard medicine was always centuries behind the need (although the requisite implements were available to our elevated beneficiaries), he was certain that he would find a way to hack the source-code of life. He would have to. The need was real. And, the terror did abound in the waiting; his mother's sickness collecting and calcifying in the inner sanctums of her brain.
The effectiveness of modern medication would reduce her to a shell again, a shell incapable of committing harm to self or others. Cognitive therapy could no longer penetrate the mired fortress of her mind. And, in the midst of episodic distress, the emergency room would only hold her against her will, authorized by a blinded and fettered welfare and institutions system set to pacify the masses. The dreaded and well feared 5150 was ever looming. Too many times had Mom been snowed under a cocktail of noxious injections administered by nurses preoccupied with online searches for their second homes (maybe a tenant could pay their mortgage for them).
The nurses all referred to their best friend as “Dr. Pepper”: Lorazepam, Haloperidol, and Diphenhydramine in a single brimming syringe inserted into Mom's hip. After this she would be transported somewhere in the state and Percy would have roughly 72 hours to concentrate on his schooling.
He would pour through texts and compendiums at the school library, searching for an answer that would be lying in wait in the tall weeds of common knowledge (that which had been made available to the common man who was always 20-plus years behind). But, no immediate savior was present. No known molecular structure could be arranged in a pharmaceutical form that would keep Mom whole and separate her from the madness.
His professors continually warned that mental illness and pharmacology were to be mere slivers in the quiver of his studies, not the bulk. If he were to stay relevant in their private discussions he would need to knuckle down, concentrate, apply himself, and so forth. It had become apparent that Percy was using the school as a means to a personal end; a grounds from which to pull information for his own research. “How dare he!” It was Percy who was guiding Percy. “This cannot stand!” Their concerns soon became manifest and he was again made to meet with the resident Dean of Students, Dr. Eli Pesache.
Where was the ethical reciprocation, he wondered. He'd been vehemently tutored in matters of societal stewardship, his debt to the greater good rolled out before him like a rope ladder that went nowhere, running parallel to the ground the entire breadth thereof. A life had been planned for him; a life bereft of a personal human condition.
“But, at what point are my concerns dealt with? Just when do my matters become the duty of society, the duty of the greater good?!” he asserted. “Why does the greater good never include me and mine?” To this he was continually referred to Social Services, to ineffable cognitive therapists appointed by the county, to a latex gloved fist of pills, and to another 72 hours of “Dr. Pepper”.
In the pursuit of truth through thought, experimentation, and experience Percy found the hallowed halls of learning to be not-so-hallowed. A funnel he imagined. A catch all his school became in his mind, with warm, unwitting bodies pouring in from all different walks, coming out the bottom cold, homogenized regurgitators of streamlined phraseology; the original thought having been thoroughly extrapolated and expunged from them, now become intellectual property of the state.
“Back to school with you, Lad. Your society needs you. Hop to, Lad. Hop to,” his eager Professors would bark. They all secretly admired and adored Percy. Their jealous speech would shake in their throats when they would direct him. They all knew that he was right. “But to what end, Lad. Psychiatry does not require your philosophy.”
“Then if there is no help for me in this world, if there is no preferable spot, I must become the help I seek. I will become this for self and for others who seek the same. Come hell or high water, I will carve my path with a toothpick if need be!”
Yes, they all admired Percy. Yes, they all rooted him along. Yes, his grades were on the verge of slipping, always slipping. And, Dr. Eli Pesache was watching him closely. Watching and waiting for his opportunity to thwart what he saw as the early pangs of the undoing of a great and golden civilization; the structuring of which he and his had long, long since engineered.
Percy could not be permitted to pull at the threads of this tightly woven tapestry. If he was allowed to persist he may one day sway his colleagues, his fellow students whom saw him as a mysterious pariah, a curiosity of non-conformity, a lovable outcast, and dare it be said, a lonesome leader in waiting. His ideas could not be given chance to root in the soil of their minds.
And, while no one was yet paying any heed to Percy, it was no coincidence that Doc Pesache had recently accepted the role of Dean of Students. It was by design. It is all by design.
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